"The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you."--Terry Eagleton

"It is impossible for me to say in my book one word about all that music has meant in my life. How then can I hope to be understood?--Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice."--Bryan Stevenson

Friday, May 18, 2012

Take me out to the (hard) ball game....

“The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,”

And this:

“Our plan is to do exactly what John McCain would not let us do: Show
the world how Barack Obama’s opinions of America and the world were
formed,” the proposal says. “And why the influence of that misguided
mentor and our president’s formative years among left-wing intellectuals
has brought our country to its knees.”

I'm not really too worried about the politics of this attack. I think this tells us everything we need to know about the source of it:

Lamenting that voters “still aren’t ready to hate this president,” the
document concludes that the campaign should “explain how forces out of
Obama’s control, that shaped the man, have made him completely the wrong
choice as president in these days and times.”

There is this weird notion among some small portion of the populace that Barack Obama has committed treason and violated the Constitution, but nothing about those claims is ever tied to anything substantive. By now the country knows what Obama wants to do and how he wants to do it, so the idea that Jeremiah Wright has secretly influenced Obama to destroy the country in his second term is laughable. It's rather like the NRA conspiracy theory that because Obama hasn't even tried to confiscate all privately held guns yet, it's proof he's going to if he's re-elected. So this campaign is only going to convince the people who are already convinced. How can I be so sure?

The group suggested hiring as a spokesman an “extremely literate
conservative African-American” who can argue that Mr. Obama misled the
nation by presenting himself as what the proposal calls a “metrosexual,
black Abe Lincoln.”

Does anybody still say "metrosexual" any more?

My primary concern was because of my sympathies with the ideas of Jeremiah Wright. That was really the only part of this that concerned me. However, later that day came news the campaign had been spiked. And now we find out why:

In 2009, the Ricketts family won a bidding
war to purchase the Chicago Cubs baseball team from the Chicago Tribune
Co. for nearly $1 billion. Within 12 months, the family was pushing the
state of Illinois to borrow $300 million to revamp the famed Wrigley Field where the Cubs play. But the proposal has yet to be approved, and now Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel,
former chief of staff to President Obama and a master of political
hardball, has made it clear he's incensed about the Rev. Wright ad
proposal and what an aide called the Ricketts' "blatant hypocrisy."

Mayor Rahm is certainly not happy:

"The Mayor was livid when he read that
the Ricketts were going to launch a $10 million campaign against
President Obama -- with the type of racially motivated ads that are
insulting to the President and the Presidential Campaign,” an Emanuel aide told the Chicago Sun-Times. "He is also livid with their blatant hypocrisy."

Publicly, Emanuel blasted the effort, which planned to link Obama to
incendiary comments Wright has made in the past. "America is too great a
country with too great a future for the content that they’re talking
about. And it’s insulting to the president. It’s insulting to the
country," he said.

The Ricketts family owns the Chicago Cubs, and Joe's son Tom is
chairman of the team. The bombshell report couldn't come at a worse time
for the Ricketts, who are seeking public funds to renovate 98-year-old
Wrigley Field. Emanuel has a plan to use amusement tax revenues and other incentives to pay for the renovations to the park, which did not have night lights until 1988.

11 Comments:

In a word, yes. There's a German word for that, and it is a sin. As I read the end of the story, I laughed out loud and relished the moment, so I suppose that means I have sinned, too. How sweet it is. But yes, we're both going to hell.

Never thought of schadenfreude as a sin, exactly. (and sorry, I wasn't trying to teach my grandmother how to suck eggs. No, wait, that's no good either....).

Certainly irony should have some ethical distinctions. But it makes me aware that Jesus employed irony more than once (it's been lost in translation over the millenia), and so now I'd have to sit down and think about the subject.....

And I was trying to be lighthearted in referencing the humor of Christ. We sometimes think even comedy (which is always at someone's expense) is sinful; or at least not officially approved. You just made me think that Jesus indulged in irony on occasion, and the great irony is that we miss that now.

Which is a subject for joyful meditation and hoped for revelation, not for reprobation (trotting out my alliterative vocabulary again. That's the off switch I can never find!)